Autonomous vehicles with a capability of independent control operation with minimal human intervention can be used in transporting people and objects. Typically, some autonomous vehicles require an initial input from an operator, while some other designs of the autonomous vehicles are under constant operator control. Some autonomous vehicles can be operated entirely by remote. For example, automatic parking is an example of the autonomous vehicle in operation in a normal human driven car, such as Tesla.
Further, the autonomous vehicles are required to operate in dynamically changing environmental conditions. For example, the autonomous vehicles may be required to track a path over varying surface stretches, at varying speeds and across different obstacles. The varying surface may include flat, winding, or hilly terrains and the different obstacles may include other vehicles or humans appearing at unexpected places or times.
At a broader level, the autonomous vehicles include a control system configured to receive sensory data corresponding to environment from a number of information gathering devices. The information gathering devices may include light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation (laser), sound navigation and ranging (sonar), radio detection and ranging (radar), light detection and ranging (LIDAR), etc. Of late, the autonomous vehicles have also been equipped with commercial cameras for information gathering to ensure maximum safety.
In conventional autonomous vehicles, the cameras are mounted in a fixed position and/or orientation which prevents the camera from achieving an optimal performance and results in unreliable image reconstruction accuracy. Due to the unreliable image reconstruction, objects represented in the images may be lost in a homogeneous texture background, thereby resulting in inaccurate lane detection functionalities, position reconstructions, detection of road markings, etc. The unreliability of the image reconstruction may be dangerous for road safety, detection of objects in vehicular path and environment, and reduce the maneuvering abilities of the autonomous vehicle.
Inaccuracies in examining how and to what extent the positioning and/or the orientation of the various sensors on a vehicle chassis influence the detection capabilities of the autonomous vehicle. Thus, as a result the maneuvering abilities of the autonomous vehicle are also hampered, thereby making the autonomous vehicle unreliable.
Autonomous vehicle with a movable camera was already known in Evans et al. U.S. Pat. No. 5,040,116. This document is cited here as reference.
How on-board camera pitch influences the computer vision image of an autonomous car is analysed in U.S. Pat. No. 9,121,717. This document is also cited here as reference.
However, the prior art is deficient in techniques that would improve image quality of the on-board cameras as the vehicle moves.